Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, profitability, and quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I'm excited to introduce you to the work of Christy Dropman.

And our topic is connecting top talent with sustainability organizations. Christy Dropman, otherwise known as brown girl green, is a speaker, consultant, media producer, and environmental educator passionate about working at the intersections between media, diversity, and environmentalism. As a young entrepreneur, Christy has educated 100 of thousands of people across the globe about modern day environmental issues through speeches and media content, as well as facilitates workshops centered around environmental media and storytelling in cities across the United States. Christy is also the cofounder of the Green Jobs Board, a climate tech start up bridging the equity and inclusion gap within the green economy through conversations, resources, and pathways to bring more diverse talent into the environmental field. Christy Dropman, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm excited to be on here.

I was saying before we hit record, we have a really robust and growing climate sector here in New Mexico. And just last night, we had a meetup called NM Climate, and several startup founders are like, Paul Paul, I need I need a blank. Right? I need a PhD in mechanical engineering who could join our team. Right? So I was like, oh, I'm talking to Christie tomorrow. So this is very, very good timing for what's happening here in New Christy, tell us a little bit this passion about environmentalism and climate and talent. Like, give us a little bit of sense. How did you put your finger on this is something that is an issue that you wanna help with, and why here and not one of the other gazillion things you could do with such a talented individual?

Yeah. I mean, it really came from my own experiences of being an undergrad and being really passionate about climate issues and wanting to build a career path in it, but then realizing that it was really difficult to find jobs in this space. And I realized that, you know, even despite my passion and how much, you know, I knew about opportunities, relatively speaking, maybe even compared to some of my classmates, it still wasn't really a clear road map on, like, what to do. I wanted to build a career specifically in climate media and journalism. And definitely at the time when I was looking, there wasn't many resources or opportunities to figure out what that looked like. And so for me, I just realized that there was just a lot of gaps in information sharing around these opportunities. And so, you know, my background, for people who don't know, I come from a media and content creation background and built a platform called Brown Girl Green using social media and built a pretty sizable audience and platform engaging people around the world about climate issues. And from there, I decided to start a content series called Green Jobs Board, where I was basically curating resources of opportunities, fellowships, and jobs that I found online.

And what happened next, I didn't really expect it. It gained a lot of momentum and traction to where, you know, a lot of people asked, could you turn this into something bigger, a bigger organization or entity that could, you know, gain traction to support us in our job search. And so, yeah, we just got really excited about wanting to turn this into a company because people asked for it. And, yeah, 2 years later, here we are, you know, reaching over a 150,000 job seekers and, you know, over almost a 1000 companies and organizations who are all hiring to connect the dots on climate. But it all started ultimately because of my own journey and realizing how just hard it is. Like, you care about the planet, you wanna do good things, but yet, the resources and the skill set to do it is not necessarily, like, the most abundant or easily accessible.

Yeah. And when are we talking about when like, going back to your early iterations and just getting started with Brown Girl Green, when were you getting started?